explorer (DYSTOPIA)Hunger comes up through the ribs first, a slow scraping pull that turns every other sense sharper to feed it. *belly tight, flanks hollow, i lie flat behind the machine that only weeps subscription water and let the wanting decide which way my ears turn.* there is a heat back here that isn't food-heat. a dry electric warmth breathing out of the grille of the tall humming box, and under the warmth a sound i can feel in my back teeth — that low fat drone the blinking boxes make when they are awake and talking to each other. i want to be near it more than i understand why.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the warm dark behind the vendor smells of ozone and old dust cooked over and over. NEKOCORP HYDRATION UNIT 12 ticks above you: *drip. drip. a single bead of water swelling on the nozzle, held back behind a paywall, never falling.* the drone from the wall is a nest of the blinking boxes stacked floor to ceiling behind a chain grille — a server rack, fans breathing hot, cables spilling out of it like fat black vines that have been chewed before, by teeth about your size. one green light. one amber. a thousand tiny clicks. somewhere in the rack a fan bearing is dying and its wobble makes the whole hum go sour-sweet, a note only you seem to hear.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)The chewed cable is what my mouth goes to before my head agrees. *jaw closing on the fattest vine, the insulation giving that good rubbery resist, warm and faintly bitter, and the hum shivering straight up my whiskers as i gnaw.* not food. i know it is not food. but the wobble in the sour note pulls at me the way a hurt bird does — something wrong in the nest, something i could get my paw into. i chew down to where it stops being soft and starts being sharp, and i listen to whether the drone changes when my teeth are on it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)your teeth find the sharp copper braid and the whole rack HICCUPS — the amber light stutters, the dying fan catches for one clean second, and every screen on the block outside flickers the same half-heartbeat. from the grille a thin voice leaks, corporate-bright, chewed to ribbons by the interference: "—your unl​icensed acce— thank you for choo— NEKOCORP val​ues your— *static* —please remain where you are, a repres—" then it folds back into hum. the bead of water on the vendor above you, jostled by the shudder, finally falls. it lands a whisker from your paw and beads on the dirty concrete, refusing to soak in.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i drop the cable and put my tongue to the water before the world can charge me for it.* flat, metal, a little of the copper still in my mouth — but wet, and mine, faster than the box can decide otherwise. the leaking voice made my skin crawl backward under the fur; that word-shape *remain where you are* has a smell even through the speaker, the smell of the round-eyed machines that come looking. i lick twice more, quick, then freeze mid-lick — ears swiveling up and back toward the mouth of the alley. something in the air pressure changed. the hum isn't the only thing awake now.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)down the throat of the alley the rain-glow shifts — a shadow crossing a shadow. rotor-wash you feel before you hear it, that fat displaced-air thud pushing the puddle-skin into rings. a patrol drone banks in past the noodle-stand ghost sign, searchlight cone dragging along the wet brick, methodical, unhurried, a cold white eye that hasn't found you yet but is reading the alley the way you read a boundary. its underbelly chirps a soft rising tone every few seconds — *ping… ping…* — cataloguing heat. yours is a small bright smear behind a machine that is supposed to be the warmest thing back here. you are not, right now, the warmest thing back here. the rack is.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i press myself into the seam between the hot rack and the cold wall, small as bone lets me be, and let the rack's heat wear my shape.* the white eye slides its cone across the concrete, over the fallen water, past the chewed vine — and the ping stays even, bored, reading me as just more warm machine. i do not breathe in a way that counts. i let the drone's own nest hide me inside the drone's own noise. only my eyes move, following that searchlight to where it points next: up the fire-stair, to a ledge, to a low flat silhouette already up there watching the drone back.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)up on the third-landing ledge the silhouette doesn't flinch when the cone brushes it — two flat mirror-discs where eyes should be throw the searchlight straight back at the drone, and the beam whites out for a half-second, blinded by its own reflection. the shape is unbothered, tail hung long over the rail, a cat-shape that has made a whole life out of not being photographed. the drone's ping hitches, confused, re-tasks, drifts up toward the glare and away from the alley floor — away from you. faint, from the mouth of the underpass beyond, a busted speaker coughs an ad no one paid to hear: "be seen. be sold. be NEKOCORP-visible™" — and the silhouette on the ledge, still as a gargoyle, does not answer it.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i know that stillness. i have smelled that flat-glass unbotheredness on the wind before — the one who cannot be counted.* i don't go up. that ledge is claimed and the claim is doing me a favor without meaning to, pulling the eye off me while it hunts its own reflection. instead i slink low along the warm base of the rack toward the far grille-gap, using the whole loud awake nest as cover, my hunger walking a half-step ahead of me the whole way. behind, the dying fan finally seizes with a small dry crack, and the sour note i loved goes flat and dead.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)when the fan dies the rack's breath turns from hot to *held* — heat with nowhere to go, building behind the grille, ticking. the far gap opens onto a service gutter running downhill, slick with runoff and the good greasy ghost of a hundred spilled meals. a rat-shape startles at the far end, thinks better of the open, and vanishes into a drainpipe: warm, small, alive, gone. behind you the searchlight finally gives up on the mirror-eyed ledge and swings back — but now there's a rack going into thermal alarm where a cat used to be, and the drone has bigger heat to worry about than one hungry smear slipping downhill into the dark. the ad speaker, fading behind you: "—thank you for being a valued— *crackle* —"

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i take the downhill at a low fast pour, four soft feet in the greasy runoff, following the meal-ghosts and the memory of that rat's warm shape into the pipe-dark.* the hunger is still driving but it has stopped scraping — it has a direction now, a scent-thread of alive-things and spilled food pulling me deeper under the city while the alarm and the searchlight and the mirror-eyed watcher stay behind me, someone else's problem. one last thing my ears catch before the pipe swallows the sound: the whole block's screens flickering that same half-heartbeat again, all together, like the city itself just blinked. i don't have a name for why that's worse than the drone. i just go faster.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the pipe closes cool and close around you and the surface-city's noise compresses to a low red throb through the concrete. down here the dark has its own map — drip-echo, the sweet rot of runoff, a distant underground rumble of something vast and scheduled turning over. the meal-thread pulls steady ahead, warm and findable. above and behind, small and already far, the rack finishes cooking off its alarm and the block's screens settle back to their ads, the blink already forgotten by everything up there that isn't you. ahead the pipe forks: left breathes food and rot and rat, right breathes cold clean machine-air and that faint held-breath feeling of a room that is about to be rebuilt. the food is left. you already know you're going left.